[drodgers]

> Especially since iOS10, and the “differential privacy” (dprivacyd) concept, which Apple pushed, and which this author feels essentially boils down to “let’s collect even more data without giving a real reason and spin it as a privacy improvement because we remove certain metadata, after all none of our users understand or care anyway”

This is too misleading and dismissive. Differential privacy collection requires that the device will send back data which doesn't contain enough information to tell anything significant about the individual, but does allow for population-level statistics to be computed from many samples (eg. the old private-survey trick of flip a coin and answer truthfully if it's heads or randomly if it's tails). If they're collecting more data with this system, then it's supposed to mean that they don't know more about you.

Almost all tech companies collect extensive usage data; Apple seems to have made a genuine and rare attempt to improve the privacy of their users (admittedly without damaging their ability to make informed product decisions). Given the popularity of AI tech and the huge amounts of data it requires, systems like this are probably the only plausible way to improve user privacy without getting left-behind in the AI and product-development race.